


Weight

by oodal (softkyun)



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Character Death, Gen, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-05
Updated: 2014-03-05
Packaged: 2018-01-14 15:10:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1271059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softkyun/pseuds/oodal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kuroko learned as a small child to have no weight - to have no presence. In the end, he wonders if he was ever weightless at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weight

When Kuroko Tetsuya was born, he had weight - perhaps a little too much.

Kuroko's mother always used to tell him how handsome his father was. A handsome, beautiful man - but a drifter, a man who never stayed by any woman's side for long, who never committed. But that beautiful, wandering man was not Kuroko's father - and when Kuroko was born, blue-eyed, blue-haired, and pale, his mother's husband took one look at knew that that wasn't his child.

As a small child, Kuroko learned to memorize the popcorn pattern of his spackled ceiling, the way that the house creaked when his mother and father got into an argument. He listened to his father's heavy footfalls when things got serious, the objects that hit the wall; he remembered the way that the lamps sounded when they shattered, the way his mother's voice cracked when she apologized, the way his father called her a whore, called Kuroko the bastard child. He didn't know what it meant, but he would learn what it was when he was older.

Kuroko learned how to be in the shadows as soon as he could walk. When his mother finally undid the lock on the room, she knelt in front of him, touched his cheek, and told him he must always be very, very quiet. Kuroko nodded, because he already knew that; he recalled the first time his mother and father had gotten violent in front of him. The crazy gesturing to him, the angry flexing of his father's jaw - he saw it all, and he had begun to cry on the couch. His father had turned to him, grabbed him by the cuff of the collar, and told him it was his fault. Why had he ever been born?

Kuroko thought of this question often. Why, he wondered? Would it be better if he wasn't? He didn't understand the real concept of death as a kid, but he understood the idea of not being noticed. When he was finally allowed around the house, he practiced what he liked to think of as being light - as if he shed off all that weight and was as free-floating as air itself, or maybe smooth like water. He learned how to show up without being noticed on his way there; sometimes, it scared his mother, but his father was always pleased that he didn't have to see his son often. It became second nature to have no weight - to have no presence.

When Kuroko went to elementary school, he didn't know how to play with other children. He was an only child, and his mother had never let him play with the children he saw outside of the window; she had brought it up, once, to his father, when Kuroko was six, because Kuroko had asked his mom about the boy with the red hair next door. His mom never told him directly that his father said no, but the blood on his mother's face was enough for him to understand even then.

So, in kindergarten, he learned to use his lack of presence to avoid the other children. He didn't understand them. They were loud, they were noisy - they were all of the things that Kuroko was never allowed to be. He didn't like it. Once, he tried to talk to a boy who everyone else seemed to like, who seemed friendly and kind like his mother, but he'd scared him. The boy had jumped back when Kuroko had murmured a polite hello, and then told him that he was weird.

Kuroko didn't try to talk to him again.

In fourth grade, Kuroko noticed that his father ruined the routine. Kuroko had grown used to the common schedule; he'd had it for years, quietly waking before anyone else in the house did, showering on his own, making food, and waiting in his room until it was time to walk to school. He had tried to ride the bus, but it didn't stop for him - he wondered if it was because he had no presence, but he also wondered if the bus driver just skipped over him. He never knew for sure, but he just started walking to school, instead. It was okay if he was late, sometimes, because he just slipped into the classroom anyways - to most people, it was like he wasn't even there. He was okay with that, because that was how it was at home.

In middle school, things changed, at least for a little while.

He, who had been obsessed with weight, with having none of it, fell in love with the weight of a basketball in his hands. It was like it was the only thing keeping him grounded; it became an anchor on a weightless boy. He wanted to make the basketball team, even if it was just so that he could hold onto his basketball, so he could hear the squeak of his basketball shoes, even if it wasn't as loud as the other boys.

Tryouts weren't easy. Kuroko hadn't ever been running before; his mother didn't like him leaving the house when he was home, and he didn't get many other changes to exercise.

Kuroko didn't make the team, and he lost his chance at basketball. He asked his father if it would be okay to go to the park a couple of blocks away, just to play on the courts, even if it was only by himself, on one of the rare nights where his father was home. He remembered his father's unhappy, exasperated sigh - the way he blew out whiskey-scented breath, the stinging feeling of the back of his father's palm on his cheek. He wondered if his father was disappointed in him for not making the basketball team, or if he was just reminding Kuroko of the same thing he had known for his entire life - that he didn't matter. He didn't matter, his hopes didn't matter - his wishes didn't matter.

Middle school was when his father really got bad. Kuroko lost track of the beer bottles smashed into his cheek, the glass he cleaned up; even when he tried to hide, even when he floated throughout his house - through his entire life - his father always found him at some point, usually after he'd found his mother. 

In eighth grade, his mother wasn't there to find anymore.

He remembered when his mother came up to his room; he wished he had paid more attention to her face, to the sad curve of her eyes, because after she left, Kuroko's father would break all the pictures around the house, eliminate every trace of her. Kuroko swept up the shattered frames, and tried to remind himself that it was okay, that the real weight of his mother was in his mind.

Kuroko stayed after school one day and held a basketball in his hands, and realized that it didn't anchor him anymore. Did anything? Every time his father hit him, another string was cut. Kuroko became obsessed with his weight - not his body weight, but the fact that he had no gravity in the world anymore. He didn't belong. He wasn't grounded. He was a balloon in a room of bowling balls. How could he feel heavy again? He had felt heavy once, when he was small, like he mattered. Sometimes, when his mother spoke quietly to him, he thought he really did matter, just a little.

In his ninth grade physics class, he and his classmates had to list things that were heavy. He didn't remember the reason, but he did remember the thing that made the top of the list - a train. Trains were heavy. Train tracks ran two blocks away from Kuroko's house, the sound of the engine wailing. A train was everything Kuroko had never been; loud, heavy. Important. Recognized. Everyone knew when a train came by.

Over the next week after that assignment, Kuroko listened for the train outside his window, wondered why he hadn't paid more attention to it before. He took note of when they came, but didn't do much about it - he thought about observing them, writing the schedule, maybe going to watch them pass. He didn't do it, never felt the total urge to go and see it.

That changed, too, like so many other things had, the day his father added another insult to the long list he already had. "Why do you exist, Kuroko?" He had asked, slurring his words, and for the first time, he'd continued on - "You'd better off dead. Fuck, my world'd be a lighter place if you were dead."

That night, Kuroko found himself at the train tracks. He'd brought a basketball with him, stupid as it was, staring at the smooth bumps of the orange ball and tracing the black lines with his fingers. The whistle sounded in the distance. The cool metal of the tracks pressed into his legs; the chilly night air turned his cheeks pink. What did it mean to matter? What did it mean to exist? He didn't think he was either - he didn't matter, he barely existed. 

Kuroko pressed his cheek to the basketball and wondered if things would be different if he had ever learned to have presence again. It was too late, though - even he knew that. The strings had been cut a long time ago; he was purposeless, a broken marionette, a drifter. The train whistle grew even louder and he wondered how things might have been different if he spoke up, if he asked for help at basketball, if he'd begged his mother to take him with her when she left his father.

The whistle blared and Kuroko shivered. He felt even lighter now, like... like everything was off his back. Was this what it was like, to take away the worry, to take away the fear and the pain and everything else he'd ever shouldered. He let out a soft breath, the tracks vibrating beneath him, and thought about how the way the tracks creaked was similar to the way his house creaked. The head-beams of the train were bright - so bright, brighter, brighter...

He thought to himself how he felt free. Maybe he had never been weightless at all - a floater, but burdened down with everything he'd ever dealt with. Bastard child. Weird. Freak. Did it matter now? What mattered in life, anymore? He inhaled the rubbery scent of the basketball, the metallic scent of the tracks, and he exhaled the heavy stuff. It would be okay, Kuroko told himself. 

The world was, indeed, a lighter place.


End file.
